Newsletter: July 18-31

CET Events 

Monday, July 18- Italian 101 potluck, 6:30 pm at CET

Tuesday, July 19- Renaissance Art & Architecture site visit: Medici Chapels

Wednesday, July 20 - Gelato Day - Carabe'

Tuesday, July 26  - Buon compleanno, Eliza!!

Wednesday, July 27 - Gelato Day - La Carraia 

Friday, July 29  - Farewell dinner meet at 7:30 pm at La Casalinga  in Piazza Santo Spirito (next door to Gusta Pizza)

Events in Florence

Wednesdays- Yoga on the River - FREE!

7:30 pm - 45-minute yoga session (Lungarno Serristori, Piazza Poggi). Bring a mat/towel.

Thursday, July 21  Indian dinner, Casa della Creativita'

Thursday, July 21  Tango Night, Piazza Ognissanti (www.tangoclub.it)

Thursday, July 21 - August: Annual summer festival every night at La Fortezza del Basso -  outdoor booths set up from many major restaurants and bars. 

http://www.infortezza.com/

July 18 - 31 Boboli opera festival (through August 3) 

Opera festival in Boboli Gardens www.festivalopera.it

Student Correspondent News: Unexpected reality

Etna, one of the most active volcanoes in the world .... 

Homeland of "La famiglia" ...

Expectation is a peculiar word. It defines what is most likely to occur in the future. The only problem is the future is unknown. It could potentially be determined through fate, past decisions, or even a predetermined path depending on your beliefs. Therefore expectation hardly meets reality, as in the case of my trip to Sicily. Sicily has several negative connotations attached to its character: the Mafia, the general preconception of the South, dry, barren landscapes, and active volcanoes. What could be good in a place like this?

  

But the Sicilian reality was incredible. It also seemed much safer than I would have expected. There were children running around the plaza at midnight without parents or supervision. Parents seem very trusting of the location and the locals. We various pasta and risotto dishes, chicken, swordfish, and even horse which I will admit I never mustered up the courage to try. 

Virgina, Kara, and I at a cooking class in Catania, Sicily 

How could I have forgotten that Italy is known for its food? Sicily has some of the most heavenly food known to man.Over the past month I have noticed more and more that dinner is a crucial point of the Italian lifestyle. Sicily has been no exception to this rule. They actually seem to embody family values more so than other places I have visited. Maybe Sicily’s remote location far off the coast of continental Italy makes it harder to both get to and leave. Italian families seem to have these roots that plunge deep into the Earth and are gnarled and twisted around other roots belonging to relatives, neighbors and even the Mafia. It would be utterly impossible to untangle them without breaking any of them. The seeds of these trees are every now and then still able to catch a gust of wind, escaping the distorted mass waiting beneath the soil. I knew family played a significant role in the Italian lifestyle, but I never realized how much pressure the future generation held on their shoulders.

Our first "cannolo siciliano" in Piazza del Duomo. Delectable! 

Members of Addio Pizzo speak to CET students in Catania 

The pizzo is a fee commonly paid to the Mafia for protection by local shopkeepers, restaurant owners, etc. It is a custom very much ingrained in Sicilian traditions. We met with an organization, Addio Pizzo, that educates citizens about the current Mafia standing and supports those who wish to extricate themselves from paying the pizzo. 

It was not until a sit down with our Italian roommate’s Sicilian friend, Claudio, that I actually understood the reserve to stop paying the pizzo. The pizzo guarantees patronage, safety of your family from other Mafia groups, they control the market and can guarantee standard prices with no undercutting. Sicilians, according to Claudio, are very prideful creatures. They are confident in their heritage and stubborn by nature. Change is not an easy concept to handle in any culture and changing a tradition (even a bad one) can be very tedious. 

The youth of Addio Pizzo are taking on the challenge to make Sicily a better and safer place to live. I was amazed at their success rate with 80 shops in Catania and 100 shops in Palermo that have found the courage to discontinue their payments. The upcoming generation is going to have a much smaller number of subjects in which the Mafia can charge a pizzo. I never expected there to be such a strong force working against the Mafia and it was really awe-inspiring to see this new organization at work.

Inspecting one of the many craters on Mount Etna's face with vulcanologist Sandro Privitera

 Mount Etna, the ever present threat, merely exists as background noise in the day-to-day life of the Sicilians. I recall the faces of my peers when the geologist announced with enthusiasm that Mount Etna had just erupted. We all looked around nervously wondering out loud why we were not making a one-eighty and heading back down the mountain. Later he informed us casually that if the volcano had a massive eruption we would have plenty of time to escape. The soil and agriculture of Mount Etna is unique from any other place in the world. It is full of succulent nutrients that rare species of plants tend to worship. It is also ideal for specialty farming, such as citrus orchards and vineyards containing a distinctive type of grape. 

After 4 days in Sicily, what can I conclude? My preconceptions =  invalid, Sicily = remarkable, unexpected reality ... 

CET Student Correspondent News: Tuscan cooking class

Our group did a Tuscan cooking class at a culinary school that had a kitchen with 4 stations set up for groups just like ours, and then a separate nicer dining area downstairs for us to eat the meal we made. 

The menu for the night was an eggplant caprese for appetizers, handmade spinach ricotta ravioli, and panna cotta with a strawberry sauce for dessert.

Eggplant Caprese:
The eggplant slices had been grilled for us, and making the rest was pretty easy. We sliced up blanched tomatoes and some fresh mozzarella, and then arranged everything. The eggplant slices were set in groups of 3 on a tray, then tomato slices were put on top. Olive oil, salt, and pepper were added, then each set was topped with mozzarella slices and oregano, creating a pyramid of delicious food. All that went in the oven for 10 minutes and came out as a delicious, easy appetizer

Ravioli:
Here was the hard part of the meal. We started out by dumping the flour on the table, creating a hole in the center, and adding eggs to make it like a volcano. Then we mixed the eggs as flour was gradually pushed inward. The dough looked pathetic at first, but as we pressed and kneaded it, it started to actually look like a dough. 

It was set aside for a while, and then rolled out and cranked through a pasta making machine. It's just a metal piece that clamps onto a table edge and has slot in the middle with adjustable width. The dough is fed through it repeatedly until it is at the thinnest setting, a process I was used to since my mom and I have made homemade pasta a lot at home. It's become one of our favorite activities to do when I'm home from college. The sheets of dough were laid out, and then a filling of ricotta, cooked spinach, and egg was mixed together and put in a plastic bag that had a narrow hole at the bottom. It was used like a pastry filler to squirt dollops of filling in a row on the sheet of pasta dough. 

Making the spinach and ricotta filling 

Then the dough was folded in half, and a metal circle was used to press the ravioli centers into shape. The chef showed us how to "massage" the gaps between each filling dollop to create individual ravioli where the 2 folded halves would seal together. Imagine the karate chop method of massaging, only here you're hitting rows of dough instead of aching muscles. Then a pizza slicer shaped object was used to cut the individual raviolis apart. It had a zigzagged edge to create a prettier edge to the ravioli. A sauce was made by cooking butter with sage in a pan - a chef just did that himself since there wasn't really much for us to do, and they also boiled the ravioli for us.

Rolling out the dough

filling the ravioli 

Squeezing the water from the gelatin sheets 

Panna cotta:

This was surprisingly easy. Cream, Vanilla, and sugar are mixed together and heated. Gelatin came in sheets and were soaked in water before adding to the pot of cream. The whole pot was heated on low and stirred continuously, but not boiled, and then when the gelatin had melted it was poured into small foil cups. Each up was put in the freezer (a refrigerator would have been better, we were told, but that would take 3 hours) for a while. The strawberry sauce was made for us and poured on top of the individual cups of the panna cotta, and served. So delicious. I need to figure out how to buy that gelatin in the States so I can make it again! 


Contributed by Laura Kaufman
History of Art & Italian Studies in Florence, Italy
Summer 2011

CET Student Correspondent News: La Traviata in Verona

We don't have classes on Fridays, but last Friday our program arranged to take us to Verona for the day. We met up in the morning and shared a bus that took us through Italy for about 3 hours until we reached Verona!

The whole group in front of the Arena

Liz in front of Juliet's House

We walked through the pretty town and went to "Juliet's House". Romeo and Juliet was set in Verona, and apparently it was somewhat based on an actual couple from similarly feuding families. So this house was one that had belonged to the family that the Capulets were based on. There was a little balcony and also a bronze statue of "Giulietta". 

Then four of us broke off to go to la Torre dei Lamberti, a giant clock tower that has 368 steps - we chose to do them instead of take the elevator, and once you start there's no changing your mind. The view from up there was beautiful. You could see red roofs everywhere, and even the Arena - a Roman amphitheater that still hosts shows. 

The view from the top of the Torre dei Lamberti

From above we could see a crowd gathering around some building, so after going back down we went to check it out. Some police officers let us know it was the president, Giorgio Napolitano's hotel room. People were waiting for him to come outside, but we didn't stick around. 

We checked out the Adige river, and after some more exploring of the small center of the city, we stopped for some pizza and a couple of my friends got coffee. We were on our way to see an opera with our group that would last until past midnight, so they wanted some caffeine to keep them up. The opera was in the Roman amphitheater - the Arena. 

Robyn and me from our seats in the Arena

We sat really high up and off to the side, so the stage wasn't actually facing us, but we could still hear everything and they weren't using microphones. The Romans had acoustics figured out pretty well, I guess! The opera was Verdi's "La Traviata". Of course we couldn't understand the words, but the synopsis was fine and the singing, dancing, and stage were all beautiful! The bus ride back took longer than expected, and we didn't actually get in bed that night until 5 am!

Laura Kaufman, 

Vanderbilt University 

History of Art & Italian Studies in Florence, Summer 2011